Several years back, three executives were hired to solve the history of problems at a chain of nursing homes in Iowa and to help improve the quality of life for the residents. The chain had a history of incidents with its residents. For instance, back in 2002 at the CLC University nursing home, a 54 year old man named George Baker Jr. burned to death is his wheelchair. The home had a history in lack of supervision and that was displayed evidently in this tragedy. He was sitting in his wheelchair unsupervised on the back patio smoking cigarettes. This incident may not have occurred had a pressurized container of oxygen not been strapped to his chair. “When the tank exploded, Baker was consumed by fire before he could be rescued.” About a year later the facility was fined $32,000 for repeatedly failing to meet basic health standards.
Then in 2004, the home was placed on the state’s list of Iowa’s worst care facilities. Only a few months later its sister facility, CLC Polk City, was also added to the list. Between the years of 1999 and 2006, while the three men managed the chain, six of the company’s seven Iowa facilities were fined a total of $73,311 by state and federal regulations.
Rather than aiding these nursing homes, the three men allegedly deceived the government between 1999 and 2006 by creating 150 fake foreign “corporations.” In reality the “corporations” were nothing more than mail boxes in many London apartment buildings. These individuals allegedly defrauded the nation’s taxpayers of around $34,000,000 dollars.
This scheme allowed the three men to use this confusing array of businesses to keep the payroll taxes they collected from workers. They also diverted other money that should have been used to pay for improved care and supervision of around 6,000 seniors living in the company’s 70 nursing homes to pay for luxury cars, antiques, monthly trips to England and Australia, and frequent shopping trips to the Gap, Saks Fifth Avenue and Wal-Mart.
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